Which Osteotomy for Osteonecrosis of the Femoral Head and Which Patient for the Osteotomy?

Transtrochanteric curved varus osteotomy (TCVO) and transtrochanteric rotational osteotomy (TRO) are joint-preserving procedures for osteonecrosis of the femoral head. The purpose of this review is to provide up-to-date guidelines for the osteotomies. One retrospective comparison revealed that TCVO has shorter operation time, less bleeding, lower incidence of osteophyte formation, and lower rate of secondary collapse. To obtain successful results of the osteotomy, the patient should be younger than 40 years and should have a body mass index of less than 24 kg/m2. The osteotomy should be performed in early stages of femoral head osteonecrosis before marked collapse of the femoral head. The patient should have a medium-size lesion and an enough viable bone to restore the intact articular surface and subchondral bone in the weight-bearing area

Familial Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 2 Parkinsonism Presenting as Intractable Oromandibular Dystonia

We have previously described a Korean family afflicted with spinocerebellar ataxia type 2 (SCA2) parkinsonism in which genetic analysis revealed CAG expansion of 40 repeats in the ATXN2 gene.1 The affected members presented with levodopa-responsive parkinsonism without cerebellar ataxia. Some showed motor fluctuation and dyskinesia, further mimicking idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD). Herein, we report a member of this family who developed jaw-opening and lingual-protrusion dystonia as the chief presentation

How do we Tweet? The Comparative Analysis of Twitter Usage by Message Types, Devices, and Sources

Facing the growing importance of social media in the marketing field, this study is intended to build a better understanding of Twitter usage. A total of 73,192 tweets were examined by message types, devices and platforms used. Instead of relying on the audience’s response (e.g., survey or experiment) or traditional content analysis, this study used a data-mining approach and software that are widely used in the computer science field. Overall findings indicate that individual users prefer mobile devices to desktops and use more official web pages or mobile applications provided by Twitter when they tweet, and their most popular message type was the Singleton, an undirected message with no specific recipient. However, we also found that tweets generated through business sources were different from those through official sources in terms of message type, devices, and the nature. The implications of these findings were discussed

Decision Attentive Regularization to Improve Simultaneous Speech Translation Systems

Simultaneous translation systems start producing the output while processing the partial source sentence in the incoming input stream. These systems need to decide when to read more input and when to write the output. These decisions depend on the structure of source/target language and the information contained in the partial input sequence. Hence, read/write decision policy remains the same across different input modalities, i.e., speech and text. This motivates us to leverage the text transcripts corresponding to the speech input for improving simultaneous speech-to-text translation (SimulST). We propose Decision Attentive Regularization (DAR) to improve the decision policy of SimulST systems by using the simultaneous text-to-text translation (SimulMT) task. We also extend several techniques from the offline speech translation domain to explore the role of SimulMT task in improving SimulST performance. Overall, we achieve 34.66% / 4.5 BLEU improvement over the baseline model across different latency regimes for the MuST-C English-German (EnDe) SimulST task.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Practical Tips on Botulinum Toxin Injections

Botulinum toxin injections are effective for hyperactivities of muscles and glands that are mediated by acetylcholine (Ach) release in neuronal terminal. The effects of botulinum toxin are reversible because the involved nerves build new sprouts and synapses with time. Thus, botulinum toxin is relatively safe and repeated applications are needed. To maximize effects of botulinum toxin without side effects, understanding the action mechanism of botulinum toxin and determining appropriate target sites are very important. Many guidelines have already been published and provided useful information for these. Therefore, in this chapter, we concentrate more on practical tips for botulinum toxin injections

Telomere maintenance through recruitment of internal genomic regions

Cells surviving crisis are often tumorigenic and their telomeres are commonly maintained through the reactivation of telomerase. However, surviving cells occasionally activate a recombination-based mechanism called alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT). Here we establish stably maintained survivors in telomerase-deleted Caenorhabditis elegans that escape from sterility by activating ALT. ALT survivors trans-duplicate an internal genomic region, which is already cis-duplicated to chromosome ends, across the telomeres of all chromosomes. These 'Template for ALT' (TALT) regions consist of a block of genomic DNA flanked by telomere-like sequences, and are different between two genetic background. We establish a model that an ancestral duplication of a donor TALT region to a proximal telomere region forms a genomic reservoir ready to be incorporated into telomeres on ALT activation.

Longitudinal evolution of cortical thickness signature reflecting Lewy body dementia in isolated REM sleep behavior disorder: a prospective cohort study

Background The isolated rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a prodromal condition of Lewy body disease including Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We aim to investigate the longitudinal evolution of DLB-related cortical thickness signature in a prospective iRBD cohort and evaluate the possible predictive value of the cortical signature index in predicting dementia-first phenoconversion in individuals with iRBD. Methods We enrolled 22 DLB patients, 44 healthy controls, and 50 video polysomnography-proven iRBD patients. Participants underwent 3-T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and clinical/neuropsychological evaluations. We characterized DLB-related whole-brain cortical thickness spatial covariance pattern (DLB-pattern) using scaled subprofile model of principal components analysis that best differentiated DLB patients from age-matched controls. We analyzed clinical and neuropsychological correlates of the DLB-pattern expression scores and the mean values of the whole-brain cortical thickness in DLB and iRBD patients. With repeated MRI data during the follow-up in our prospective iRBD cohort, we investigated the longitudinal evolution of the cortical thickness signature toward Lewy body dementia. Finally, we analyzed the potential predictive value of cortical thickness signature as a biomarker of phenoconversion in iRBD cohort. Results The DLB-pattern was characterized by thinning of the temporal, orbitofrontal, and insular cortices and relative preservation of the precentral and inferior parietal cortices. The DLB-pattern expression scores correlated with attentional and frontal executive dysfunction (Trail Making Test-A and B: R = − 0.55, P = 0.024 and R = − 0.56, P = 0.036, respectively) as well as visuospatial impairment (Rey-figure copy test: R = − 0.54, P = 0.0047). The longitudinal trajectory of DLB-pattern revealed an increasing pattern above the cut-off in the dementia-first phenoconverters (Pearsons correlation, R = 0.74, P = 6.8 × 10−4) but no significant change in parkinsonism-first phenoconverters (R = 0.0063, P = 0.98). The mean value of the whole-brain cortical thickness predicted phenoconversion in iRBD patients with hazard ratio of 9.33 [1.16–74.12]. The increase in DLB-pattern expression score discriminated dementia-first from parkinsonism-first phenoconversions with 88.2% accuracy. Conclusion Cortical thickness signature can effectively reflect the longitudinal evolution of Lewy body dementia in the iRBD population. Replication studies would further validate the utility of this imaging marker in iRBD

The genetic basis of natural variation in C. elegans telomere length [preprint]

Telomeres are involved in the maintenance of chromosomes and the prevention of genome instability. Despite this central importance, significant variation in telomere length has been observed in a variety of organisms. The genetic determinants of telomere-length variation and their effects on organismal fitness are largely unexplored. Here, we describe natural variation in telomere length across the Caenorhabditis elegans species. We identify a large-effect variant that contributes to differences in telomere length. The variant alters the conserved oligosaccharide/oligonucleotide-binding fold of POT-2, a homolog of a human telomere-capping shelterin complex subunit. Mutations within this domain likely reduce the ability of POT-2 to bind telomeric DNA, thereby increasing telomere length. We find that telomere-length variation does not correlate with offspring production or longevity in C. elegans wild isolates, suggesting that naturally long telomeres play a limited role in modifying fitness phenotypes in C. elegans